(LifeSiteNews) – A coach who objected to San Jose State University (SJSU) allowing a male player to be on the women’s volleyball team is suing the California State University (CSU) system for wrongful termination.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, former assistant head coach Melissa Batie-Smoose filed a 33-page Title IX complaint over Braden “Blaire” Fleming, a male 6-foot-1 redshirt junior who plays outside hitter and whose participation spurred numerous other schools to refuse to play against the team.
Batie-Smoose maintained that Fleming’s leaping and spiking abilities “exceeded that of any player in the conference,” that other players were not aware of his true sex, that the school gave him preferential treatment to the point of cultivating a culture of fear for those who had reservations about him, and that he allegedly colluded with a female opponent on Colorado State’s squad to potentially injure teammate Brooke Slusser, who had publicly expressed opposition to playing with him (Slusser has continued to endure threats for her stance).
After filing her objections, Batie-Smoose was suspended indefinitely in November 2024. Now, Campus Reform reported that her contract was not renewed in 2025, prompting a Title IX complaint alleging viewpoint discrimination.
“(O)ther coaches who did not oppose the inclusion of a biological male on the women’s volleyball team” were not “subjected to suspension, termination or any discriminatory actions as was Plaintiff,” the suit contends. As a result, Batie-Smoose has “suffered and continues to suffer lost wages, loss of professional reputation and opportunity, emotional distress, and other damages.”
The Trump administration Department of Education, meanwhile, opened a Title IX investigation into SJSU and other schools in February.
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men (do) not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen (biological men) afforded by the (International Olympic Committee) guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
Even the left-wing United Nations has acknowledged as much, via an October 2024 report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, that found that more than 600 female athletes around the world have lost more than 890 medals to men in 29 sports as of March 2024. “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport,” the report concluded.
In America since the 1980s, more than 1,941 gold medals in female events that would have gone to female athletes have instead been claimed by men identifying as “trans women,” and along with them more than $493,173 in prize money across more than 10,067 amateur and professional events, according to data compiled by He Cheated and reviewed by Concerned Women for America.